Kurt Wood can remember when someone wanted to call the R.E.M. band "Slug Bait."

A manager at the Taco Stand on Milledge Avenue and disc jockey at WRFC radio station, Wood said the nationally-known "new music" group held a contest to find a name after they formed, around 1980.

Although R.E.M.'s success continues to bring national attention to Athens, Wood said it was the B-52's who launched the sound revolution that peaked here around 1979-82.

"The B-52's were definitely the first group," Wood said. "I heard about them sometime around the end of '77 - a local band, playing new music."

But the B-52's rarely played at clubs here, Wood said. They played mainly at parties and in 1979, they signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to New York.

What is "new music?"

"It's different," Wood said. "Really great - slasher. It's simpler. Heavy metal bands have hard edges, but they're too much into showmanship. New music should be taken on its own terms."

A newspaper article in 1981 stated that new music was different from "punk' music. Former WUOG radio station manager Mike Henry said then, "Athens New wave does not attack."

But some say the punk scene that started with the Sex Pistols band in England sparked new music in the U.S.

Why?

"The music that was played on the radio then was pretty boring," Wood said. "It all had a higher energy level in the mid-60s. After about 1970 it quieted down. All the baby boom generation who had lived through the changes in the late '60s kind of mellowed out, as they say. James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt - I always hated that stuff - it wasn't relevant. Then there was the progressive stuff like Emerson-Lake and Palmer that had gone so far in left field, it seemed pretty pretentious."

All this was pretty annoying to people like Michael Stipe, singer for R.E.M. In 1981, Stipe said, "Radio is such a wasteland, and has been for such a long time."

So Stipe and others like him took matters into their own hands.

"Yeah, so some people said, 'Well, no one's making music we like, so why don't we do it?" Wood said. "It was a real do-it-yourself attitude. A lot of them could barley play at all . . . That was the whole point."

The 40 Watt Club (now closed) was once located on College Square. A club called Tyrone's (which burned) began drawing local bands in 1979 and the Uptown Lounge followed suit in 1983.

Bands with names like Love Tractor, Method Actors, Side Effects and Oh-OK were formed.

Is the Renaissance of new music now past history?

"No, it's probably as strong as ever," Wood said. "I think there's more bands now, But it's just like anything when it ages - it loses its innocence or whatever."